Random lasers based on inverse photonic glass structure

Abstract

Random laser has attracted much attention because of its unique physical properties and potential applications in lighting, speckle-free imaging, biosensing, and photonic devices. In this work, we confirm that scattering plays a vital role in random lasing. Then, we investigate lasing properties of random film lasers with two scattering structures, including polystyrenemicroparticles and air voids embedded in a polymer matrix with organic dye serving as a gain medium. These two structures are called direct and inverse photonic glass, respectively. The result indicates that random lasers based on inverse photonic glass have a lower threshold. Following this achievement, we implemented inverse photonic glass into microspheres to obtainrandom microlasers of different sizes. Our work shows that inverse photonic glass structure is an excellent medium for random lasers with a wide range of sizes and dimensions. Especially, the obtained random microlasers are promising for applications in microsensors and photonic integrated circuits.